Scripps Howard News Service/July 21,1999 By Lou Kilzer

"I miss you, and I never want to go through this again."
Eric is speaking from Spring Creek Lodge, a private
behavior modification camp for teen-agers in a remote part of
Montana. His mother sent him there.

A camp official taped the 11-minute video to persuade
Eric's father, who is divorced from the boy's mother, to keep
him there.

The tape has the opposite effect. Craig Stone barely
recognizes his son. The once happy-go-lucky boy now seems
distraught.

Armed with custody papers, Stone drives from his home
near Seattle to Thompson Falls, Mont., and contacts the
county sheriff. The sheriff calls Spring Creek Lodge, and
soon Eric goes free.

Eric's story involves a Utah-based network of companies
operating a far-flung chain of facilities designed to break
teen-agers of behavior that has driven their parents to
desperation. The companies are commonly known as Teen Help.
Teen Help's style is not for the faint-hearted. It helps
some parents arrange the seizure of disruptive teen-agers,
even from their homes in the middle of the night.
T Government regulation of these programs is spotty, and
for now, teens sent to these facilities have little legal
standing to challenge their confinement.
Teen Help was started by Robert Lichfield, 45, a southern
Utah businessman who lives on an estate in the spectacular
canyon country near St. George.

He hired David Gilcrease to create a behavior
modification program to all but guarantee parents would see a
change in their teens.

Gilcrease had been trainer from 1974-81 for LifeSpring, a
company that perfected a form of encounter session called
"large group awareness training."

"Do I say that it's for everybody in the world?"

Gilcrease said. "No, but I don't think everybody in the world
needs a psychological examination, either."een Help then ships them to
far-off compounds where the
message is simple: Cooperate or you won't see Mom, Dad and
the outside world for a long time.

They can't do anything, including talking or using the
bathroom, without permission.

The aggressive methods have spawned allegations of child
abuse, prompting authorities to raid or investigate
facilities in Mexico, the Czech Republic, Utah, South
Carolina. Facilities in the first three locations closed.
Parents pay the company $26,000 to $54,000 a year to
modify the behavior of their children. The company does that
with methods that include intense group encounter sessions
run by "facilitators" who generally have little academic
training in psychology or similar fields.

Teen Help has many admirers. Hundreds of parents and
teens credit its programs with producing spectacular
turnarounds in troubled young people, even saving their
lives.

"If we could expose all of our children to this
environment, there truly would be peace on earth," Marsha
Mandrussow Gallagher, whose son, Collin, lived at Spring
Creek Lodge part of last year, said in Teen Help promotional
material.

Speculation has reverberated among parents, mental health
experts and social commentators about whether Eric Harris and
Dylan Klebold could have been helped before they murdered 12
fellow students and a teacher and killed themselves.
The debate about Teen Help centers on whether its brand
of "tough love" is appropriate for adolescents stumbling
through one of the most emotionally vulnerable periods of
their lives.

Several psychologists and psychiatrists expressed
skepticism and alarm about Teen Help's methods.
"There's something very creepy about this," Seattle
psychiatrist August Piper said. "It's kind of frightening. It
sort of smacks of brainwashing, doesn't it?"

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